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Hello From The Borderlands

by frank news

December 11, 2018

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Today the President of the United States said he would shut down the government if the border wall was not funded. In July frank spent a month in El Paso, Juarez, and the surrounding towns and cities listening to the border voice for a deeper understanding of our immigration system and border. Locals offer a nuanced perspective in an otherwise stagnant conversation. Below are a few pieces with great insight.

Josiah Heyman is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Interamerican and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has worked in the U.S.-Mexico border region as a scholar and activist since 1982. Most recently, he co-editedThe U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region: Cultural Dynamics and Historical Interactions.

In radically distinguishing between “inside” and “outside,” borders simplify each side. The inside is treated as a singular, cohesive entity. This often identifies insiders (archetypically, white citizens) with safety, well-being, and righteousness. The good but also vulnerable self is protected inside a powerful cover of nationhood—symbolically a safe home, as in “homeland security.” Sources of danger—especially unpredictable, mortal, and non-white ones—are relegated outside. In between the two is the perfect border that surrounds the home, protects from all danger, and filters in only good people and flows. The threshold of the home is particularly at risk. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas noted many years ago in her book Purity and Danger, people and things that stay inside conceptual distinctions and boundaries are ordinary, but those that cross such boundaries are impure, powerful, and dangerous. Perfect border visions are compelling drivers of politics because perfection of containment is desirable, but can never be achieved.

Kathleen (Kathy) Staudt is a retired political science professor living in El Paso.Her most recent book is titled Border Politics in a Global Era: Comparative Perspectives (2017).

Here in the borderlands, our vantage points offer frontline vision for how Washington DC policy hits practice, particularly the demagogic policies and cruel practices. We have had our share of marches, protests, and emergency outreach to vulnerable people exposed to the illegality of border guards refusing to accept asylum-seekers. Family separation and a "zero tolerance policy" in 2018 have roused the conscience of people nationwide. I am elated, even relieved when I see pictures of both borderland and heartland people and their evocative signs: “no family separation,” “this is not America,” and so on.

Do you have a proposed solution? Ways in which you think that these institutions should be financed? Is the answer to collect small donations?

That’s one solution. I have done quite a bit of research on the history, not only of arts organizations in the U.S., but also of philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, and trusteeship. When you take in the whole picture, it gets harder, unfortunately, to envision change. But when you extend that picture beyond cultural organizations and the nonprofit sector to include civic, professional, and other kinds of community organizations, one does find other models. In the visual arts and in the big cultural and educational institutions, the model is self-selecting and self-perpetuating boards who are usually required to make personal financial contributions, which collapse patronage and governance.

But there are many other types of organizations that have board elected by the membership, in a democratic process, and in which all the members support the organizations directly through small contributions and participate in governance.

I know of almost no cultural institutions in America that have that structure. I do know of cultural institutions in Europe that have that structure, such as Kunstvereins, or art associations, in Germany, which have histories that go back to the early part of the 19th century. They are supported by their members, who also elect the board and participate in governance.

There are a lot of organizations that have that structure. Museums have not, for the most part, had that structure, although there are museums in the book that started out as art associations.

Museums in the United States developed as private nonprofit corporations; they did not develop as democratically governed or structured institutions.

I think we are in a period where many are laying claims to identity based on a set, and it's not even ill-intended, but it just seems natural that some sense that identity is trans-historical or something. That's one of the problems of that.

We like to think of identities as permanent, but I think they're in large part contextual, and historically relativistic.

One thing I often think about is the definition of black that we ordinarily ascribe to skin color. But, if you go far enough back in U.S. history, Irish and Italians are categorized as black. It shows how it has to do with social hierarchy and shifts in that.

One funny thing that happened to me over the summer was that we have friends who teach in Koln and Dusseldorf, we did visiting artist spots with them and when we were in Chris William's class, we spoke to several of his students, and they did presentations. Interestingly, none of the work was about identity. Not even the work of a trans-woman in the class.

In the US, it would be like, oh, if you're trans, you would have to do work about your identity, but this woman wasn't. It's not what her focus was at all.